Crisis in opportunity: Naomi Klein on disaster capitalism

[Joanne98]

Beyond my requisite Women’s Studies viewing of Marilyn Waring’s Who’s Counting: Sex, Lies and Global Economics (which is kick-ass), I hate economics. Economy talk makes me mad. It’s because pundits talk about it as if it’s something more precious than life itself. Same with the market. Or capital. I like my political talk to start and end with living beings and their rights to live, work, and die with dignity.

Ok, ok, I’m also intimidated by economic talk - even with university courses in macro and microeconomics under my belt. It’s been a long road to realizing that my lack of confidence isn’t just my own personal failing, but this feeling is rooted in the way that economic theory is purposefully held outside the reach of ordinary people. We are led to believe that the economy is a precious stone that can only be handled by a few experts.

My friends and I have been trying to talk through the big news from Wall Street this week on the proposed (and now failed) government-led bailout of the US economy. None of us feel capable to explain it, or understand it. How can anyone even think about allocating $700 billion to the very crooks who created this whole mess?

Lucky me, my union local gave me a free ticket to go see Naomi Klein talk about her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism last night. This post is mostly a synopsis of her talk, which is also available as an audio file, if I manage to get you intrigued.

While the sheer number of dollars in the bailout is unbelievable, I’m not that surprised that government thinkers decided that giving money to bankers was a good way to solve the problem. After all, they’ve been doing it for years. With decades of neoliberal governments behind us, the bankers and the government have long been playing for the same team: global capital. Where governments were once expected to regulate global capitalism, thereby limited the money-grab party by big businesses, now they’re pouring the drinks, Naomi explained.

And now we’re in crisis, they say. Our precious stone is turning to dust. People are afraid. On the election campaign, Stephen Harper has been trying to scare us with “bad times ahead” talk – and is trying to convince us that he’s the leader to get us through it. (Yeah right.)

We are in shock because we don’t know how to explain what has happened, Klein said. This economic meltdown is really disorienting because we understand the world through our stories, and we’ve got no story for this. The rapid changes in the global economy have overwhelmed us, and made us believe that we can’t comprehend or fix them using people power. Instead, we figure we need government or big business or economic experts to figure out this so-called crisis and explain it to us with their stories.

But let’s remember that crises are moments that are produced and manipulated by people in power. Naomi Klein calls crisis a “democracy avoidance tactic” – Remember the Patriot Act, anyone?

Continued>>>
http://www.shamelessmag.com/blog/2008/09/crisis-in-opportunity-naomi-klein-on-disaster-cap/

[ixion]

1. I disagree that there is no story for this... what we're seeing is a story as old

as human society. It goes like this:

The wealthy folks game the system so that the revenue streams flow top down, and what trickles down from the top is just enough to keep the slave class alive. Eventually, over time, the system grows so large that it can no longer sustain itself, and so the system collapses. Rome is a great example of the age of this story. A few details may be different, but the story is the same.

We're not too bright in this regard. We seem to have a penchant for playing the same scenario out over and over again throughout history. If we truly lived and learned from out stories, this would not be the case.